Today we find out that the posse reportedly included at least one man convicted of sex crimes against children. And even worse, and what no one has apparently yet realized: The convicted child sex criminal posse member worked for Arpaio for years in the Sheriff’s office until he was arrested in 2009.

Sheriff Arpaio, the top law enforcement official in sprawling Maricopa County, is perhaps best known for his hard-nosed treatment of prisoners and his aggressive raids aimed at illegal immigrants. But it is his department’s approach to more than 400 sex-crimes cases that has Sheriff Arpaio in trouble.

His deputies failed to investigate or conducted only the sketchiest of inquiries into hundreds of sex crimes between 2005 and 2007, investigations by Arizona law enforcement agencies have shown. Many of those cases involved molested children.

And only today we find out that after a lengthy five-year investigation, Arpaio has decided that no particular person is to blame for “hundreds of botched sex-crime investigations by the Maricopa County sheriff’s special-victims unit.” From the Arizona Republic, today:

A five-year investigation that produced nearly 10,000 pages of documents draws no clear conclusion on who is to blame for hundreds of botched sex-crime investigations by the Maricopa County sheriff’s special-victims unit.

The Sheriff’s Office on Monday released results of its long-running probe into why the unit mishandled sex-crime cases. It concluded that no single person was responsible for systemic failures that resulted in hundreds of cases being reopened.

Last year, an Arizona Republic investigation into the 400-plus reopened cases revealed that the Sheriff’s Office failed to adequately investigate reports of sex abuse and assault — in some cases never interviewing suspects or running background checks on known offenders.

Some sex-crime complaints were completely ignored. In other cases, files were later found gathering dust in a drawer or in a deputy’s garage. Those shortcomings, combined with lengthy delays in resolving cases, left alleged predators free to find other victims — sometimes for years.

So what happens? The sheriff accused of having lax standards for investigating sex crimes against children didn’t do a sufficient investigation to weed out a school posse member who had a record of sex crimes against children.

The controversial sheriff has teamed up with actor Steven Seagal to teach his “posse” how to handle school shooting incidents, and liquor story robberies. (Despite being 60 years old, actor Seagal claims to have “hundreds of thousands if not millions of hours into my weapons training.” I did the math. A million hours would make Segal 114 years old.) One presumes Seagal will be showing the fat old men how to do Aikido, when they’re not beating their wives, getting high, or committing sex crimes against children.

Courtesy of CBS, let’s meet one of the members of Joe Arpaio’s posse patrolling Arizona’s elementary schools:

And then there was Jacob Cutler. According to a Flagstaff police report, Cutler threw his girlfriend to the ground and choked her while trying to sexually assault her in 2008. When she didn’t cooperate, he allegedly threatened to call police and said they would side with him, because he “has a badge.” He was a member of Arpaio’s posse at the time.

Oh but it gets better. CBS reports again:

But then there’s Dominic Boulter, arrested in 2009 for crimes against children, and a year later he was sentenced. We found him still on the posse roster.

According to an arrest report, Boulter began using an online service called Phonezoo.com in early 2005 to meet young girls between 13 and 17 years old. Boulter ultimately exchanged nude photos and text messages with at least eight underage girls from around the country. Boulter also suggested that he meet the girls in person to engage in sex acts and to get married, according to court documents.

During the encounters, Boulter told the girls he was 15 years old, 27 years old and 32 years old, according to the document.

Boulter admitted to detectives that he had sent harmful images to one underage girl and that he chatted with another via text message and Web cam as he encouraged the child to masturbate, according to court documents.

And the best part? Boulter worked in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office as a detention officer for seven years. And who was the Sheriff? More from AZCentral:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio declined to comment on the case.

We’re to believe that Sheriff Arpaio didn’t realize that his own employee was a posse member and/or that the employee had been convicted of a sex crime with children. That’s one hell of an oversight. Just how many employees did Arpaio have who were convicted of sex crimes?

Boulter has been placed on an electronic-monitoring system and is not allowed to have unsupervised contact with minors.

Yet, Arpaio gave Boulter a job where he was put in charge of the safety of minors, and possibly armed.

If Arpaio wasn’t able to figure out that his own former employee was a sex criminal, how good a job is he going to do filtering out the other criminals he’s putting in and around Arizona’s elementary schools?

Apparently not that good a job. The local TV station checked out 2,000 of the 3,000 members of Arpaio’s posse and they found 60 or so with criminal records. Why didn’t Arpaio find them first? He’s the Sheriff. Doesn’t he have more resources than the local TV station when it comes to finding convicted criminals, not to mention, ones who used to work for him?

Chris in Paris
An American in Paris, France. BA in History & Political Science from Ohio State. Provided consulting services to US software startups, launching new business overseas that have both IPO’d and sold to well-known global software companies. Currently launching a new cloud-based startup. Full bio here.

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The old white people keep electing him. He won by paying nearly 7 million and won by a VERY small percentage.

slj

He didn’t run unopposed this time. We had a good candidate – Paul Penzone. Unfortunately things went wrong…

Ben

It seems the only crime Arizonians are concerned with is a Mexican holding two jobs to support his family but everything else goes.

http://www.facebook.com/cheryle.osburnteats Cheryle Osburn Teats

Maybe not, I’m sure he controls the voting……….if not directly then certainly knows the people that do.

Bojorco

Screw this. Are you people really foaming at the mouth over Joe Arpaio hiring a pedophile? Oh come on… be serious. He hired…STEVEN SEAGAL. Do I have to write it again in caps? STEVEN SEAGAL!!!!
Is it entirely lost on people that THAT VERY SENTENCE should equate to a complete and irreversible loss of credibility in Joe Arpaio?????? Never mind the paedo douche, that’s awful on its own. But isn’t the fact that many people take Sheriff Joe seriously precisely because he hired (hold your ears)…STEVEN SEAGAL as a deputy just too repugnant to tolerate? My god, come on!

Naja pallida

Probably has something to do with the treaty we signed with France that says they have no obligation to extradite their own citizens… and on the US side, nobody has really put much effort into it. The media has hyped it much more than the Justice Department has ever really cared.

lolo2255

He runs unopposed, which is very common for Sheriffs, since you have to be a police officer to run, that means he is your boss and you are trying to take your boss’s job and say you will do a better job than him. It’s the same in Dupage County (here in Illinois where I live) our Sheriff (Zaruba) runs unopposed every election because the last guy to run against him lost his job after the election was over. Yep, fired for going against the boss. He’s currently being investigated for corruption, and around the Sheriff’s Department it’s well known he is going to step down and put one of his cronies in his place. It’s the same everywhere, it’s all politics, you know the right person, or give enough money to their campaigns, you can get whatever job you want. Last election Zaruba ran unopposed, I refused to check his name when I voted, but when he’s the only candidate he had already won.

http://twitter.com/ZombiePrepNet Zombie Prep Network

So how come you guys let Roman Polansky hang out there?

http://twitter.com/carltoersbijns Carl Toersbijns

I predicted this the first time Joe A announced his plan to use the posse.. there are many members on this posse that can’t be certfied as real cops because of background checks and misdemeanors that are character flaws, moral turpitude issues and other risky behaviors around children.. Enufff said..

FuzzyRabbit

I love watching old B-movie westerns from the 1930s and 1940s. One of the bad guys in many of these movies is the corrupt town sheriff who hires hoodlums for his deputies. In the movies this sheriff doesn’t care about the law or that everyone knows he is a thug; he rules by fear.

Arpaio is exactly that kind of sheriff.

Fifi

BGN,

You are quite wrong about France. Not quite the ‘easy going’ place you seem to imagine. Full age of consent is 18 and adults can end up in jail for “détournement de mineurs” for relations with less than 18 years old’s, as it happened fairly recently to Pierre Bellanger, the founder of the SkyRock radio network (imagine ClearChannel’s CEO) who was reportedly quite surprised…

You would have to live here to believe AZ and more specifically Maricopa County. Some really nice people, but most unbelievable.

http://twitter.com/davidcaryhart David Hart

Wherever would Joe find the time to do such irrelevant background checks? After all, Joe’s been busy authenticatin’ the President’s birth certificate. When he’s not doing that he seems to be on TEEvee. Yet the citizens of Maricopa County keep electing this schmuck. They have to be the dumbest yahoos on the planet.

Peter

I hate using the comparison, but it fits so well with Arpaio. Looking back at the rise of Nazism you wonder how people could be turned into people who could perform such sadistic acts on another human. Then you look at good ole Joe, and can actually picture him falling into line with just such a despotic regime.

http://www.rebeccamorn.com/mind BeccaM

Really? America only has online sex criminals? And it’s only illegal here? How about this then:

Police said Wednesday they have smashed a huge international pedophile ring, rescuing 230 children from abuse and arresting 184 suspects – including teachers and police officers.

The three-year investigation code named Operation Rescue uncovered 670 suspects and identified and safeguarded children in more than 30 countries by arresting people accused of abusing them, said Rob Wainwright, director of the European Union police agency Europol.

The ring was centered on an Amsterdam-based online forum called boylover(dot)net, which Wainwright described as “probably the largest online pedophile network in the world.”

“These are very serious crimes on a truly global basis,” he added.

(snip)
After his arrest, the forum’s Dutch administrator helped police crack the complex web of encryption measures shielding users’ identities, allowing police to begin covert investigations that included posing as children online.
(snip)
Australian Federal Police commander Grant Edwards said suspects arrested in Australia ranged in age from 19 to 84 and used the Internet to “prey on children with anonymity, with subterfuge and with camouflage.”
(snip)
Children, Edwards said, “should be able to use the Internet safely, without fear of being approached or groomed by these online predators.”

There’s this thing called Google, you might try it sometime to help alleviate that “as far as I know” problem.

Stev84

It’s absolutely idiotic that law enforcement officials are elected in the first place. What’s worse many places also elect judges and the top prosecutors. So you have all three branches of the justice system elected and thus beholden to the most radical parts of mob whom they promised to be “tough on crime”. It’s no wonder America has by far the highest prison population on the planet.

http://www.rebeccamorn.com/mind BeccaM

You really do not know me at all. And you’ve obviously not read very many of my comment posts, to make these ridiculous assertions about what you think I believe.

You might want to wait a little longer than 11 days and for more than 11 registered-user comments before you start insulting people and making specious assertions as to who they are and what they believe.

ComradeRutherford

He gave his solemn word that he would no molest any children while on duty and his word was good enough for the Sheriff!

http://adgitadiaries.com/ karmanot

Yep, Arizona—the Bavaria of America.

http://adgitadiaries.com/ karmanot

ppppffffftttt

http://adgitadiaries.com/ karmanot

Oh honey, take your cracked-pot victimazition to another blog site and give us a break, it’s too close to Easter for a crucifixation at this point.

samizdat

Well, you know, those kids and the women, they were asking for it. /s

Sigh.

I am old enough to remember when these whackjobs–the Good Sheriff and his Posse(LOL!)–wouldn’t have been able to get within a thousand miles of a job in law enforcement. They would have been laughed out of the room and off the pages of the Letters to the Editor section, too.

Now? Shit, they’re fine upstanding members of the community. And as BeccaM notes, he keeps getting re-elected.

http://twitter.com/BanGunsNowUSA Ban Guns Now

Yes, in every jurisdiction in America, the same country where guns are revered. You should get used to American exceptionalism on all fronts, since you clearly endorse it. Those of us working for actual change are willing to acknowledge our country’s full-spectrum failings, including–and especially–the criminal justice system. Liberals rushing to promote universal background checks as a solution to gun violence, for example, are simply endorsing the disarming of blacks and Hispanics, who obviously make up a disproportionate number of America’s felons (by one account, 75% of Washington, DC black men are felons, and cannot legally own firearms or live in houses where they are stored). The NRA wins–whites get guns, blacks don’t. If a few white “perverts” and poor white trash get lumped in with the blacks, so be it. You’re simply helping people like Arpaio in the long run.

http://twitter.com/BanGunsNowUSA Ban Guns Now

You can show me a case of a French citizen being branded a child sex criminal for talking to a teenager on the Internet about sex? As far as I know, that’s uniquely American. Regardless, this list was obviously quickly assembled by a staffer. There’s no way it would be implemented without background checks–presumably this convicted felon can’t even live in a house with a gun in it, much less carry one on his person in a school. Nothing suggests that the people on this list who are forbidden from exercising their “Constitutional right” to bear arms wouldn’t have been prevented from doing so.

Carl Gorney

They SHOULD, but they won’t.

They don’t have the balls to do it.

Just like DOJ doesn’t have the balls to go after the Wall Street folks who wrecked our economy in 2008.

Also, given the fact this pedophile previously worked in Arpaio’s office, there’s no way Arpaio didn’t know.

HermeticallySealed

Actually, the age of consent is 15 . . . . Also, it is immaterial. There are places in the US that have age of consent under 17, that doesn’t change the fact this guy was arrested for SEXUAL interactions with underage girls. He is a criminal by judgement of the laws he was tried and convicted under, and forbidden from interacting with any children. The Sheriff, of all people, should have known this, as well as the 60 plus other criminals he’s wanting to arm and place with school kids.

http://adgitadiaries.com/ karmanot

Went right over your tinfoil hat BGN

http://adgitadiaries.com/ karmanot

—Have been saying this for years: Arpaio is a clear and present danger to any Arizona citizen. He’s a brown-shirt war lord with his own private army of several thousand thugs. The DOJ or Homeland Security should put him out of business as soon as possible.

http://www.rebeccamorn.com/mind BeccaM

I think you’re missing the main points of the post, and it’s not ‘no guns in schools’ — which has been covered repeatedly on this blog. They are here, in this specific post, as I see them:

– Sheriff Arpaio is criminally incompetent and negligent at his elected job and ought to be removed from office. Whatever he thinks he’s doing to uphold the law, it clearly does not extend to enforcing laws to protect adults and children from sexual assault.

– He’s so keen on setting up his penis-compensating ‘posse’ of overweight sweaty white men, and this notion that a uniform and a badge automatically make you a ‘good guy,’ he doesn’t care that he’s recruited convicted felons and at least one convicted known pedophile who isn’t legally allowed to be anywhere near children, much less an entire school full of them.

BTW, there are plenty of laws in this country that bar adults from engaging in sexual behavior with children online. Interacting? No. Sending naked pictures and urging a kid to masturbate? Illegal as all hell in every jurisdiction.

http://twitter.com/BanGunsNowUSA Ban Guns Now

Just to be clear, Chris, this “child-sex” criminal would not be a criminal under the laws in the nation you are now residing in (which has no special laws about adults and minors interacting on the Internet, and has an age of consent of 14). Attacking Arpaio from the Right screams of desperation. If you want to oppose guns in school on principle, do so. Clearly America has no shortage of capability for background-checking–it leads the world in it.